A Tale of Two Leaks

Today was rather lovely, looking a lot like Spring and the first outside drying day of the year. Apparently, it is to be wet and stormy tomorrow but I care not for there will be more fine days to come. Anyway, I have a clothes horse and a dryer.

For it has been a leaky few days and there have been a lot of wet towels. Our first problem was the downstairs toilet cistern and the second, the dishwasher. The drip from the cistern had been an ongoing problem and on Saturday Bert set to dealing with it. Unfortunately, he made it worse and had to wait until today to get the part he needed to fix it. The next plumbing job on his list was the dishwasher. We had been noticing a faint but horrible smell coming from around the cooker and thought it was gas leaking. Bert called a gas fitter who arrived in the yard twenty minutes later. The gas man tested all the fittings and pronounced them safe. He did notice the whiff but said it definitely wasn't gas. Maybe we had a wee dead mouse behind the kickboards? He charged Bert twenty pounds and was on his way. I was mightily relieved. Wee dead mice are far less of a health hazard than leaking gas pipes and twenty quid is a small price to pay for the reassurance that all the fittings were safe.

So! Off with the kickboards. There were zero rodent corpses to be seen but there was a slick of sludgy, stinky water underneath the dishwasher and the cabinet next to it. The dishwasher had a tiny little hole in one of the outlet pipes. Bert thinks he can fix it.

It's a shame that we're on lockdown because the godson is a qualified plumber and I'm sure he'd have given Bert a hand if he'd been able. Bert hates plumbing because it's so fiddly and he thinks the plastic fittings used nowadays are shoddy. According to the first daughter, everyone hates plumbing, even plumbers and there might be something in that as the godson, between jobs when the first lockdown started has not been back on a site since. He's been painting and decorating and now he's working in a pharmacy selling lipstick and indigestion tablets. That young fellow could turn his hand to anything. Just like his da and his godfather.